That this whine is entirely autobiographical is obvious from the
writing. The PC is implemented right down to his fingernails, with
faux-objective descriptions that go into the kind of detail only a lonely
onanist would notice, and not much else is implemented at all. We are
subjected to lots of irony-free angst as this sensitive, recorder-playing
creep has his hopes raised and then cruelly dashed by some uncaring girl
on a dating site. The game, which is dedicated to the girl in question,
was written and released in bad faith. In truth, the author has not
written an IF game at all, but a pathetic cry for sympathy, an
unbelievably shameful and humiliating attempt to worm his way into the
girl's affections. It's a work of no dignity whatsoever. This would be bad
enough in someone's livejournal, but the
author has gone worse still and written it in the second person. Don't
impose your own sad life on me, you creep. This is your angst, not mine.
Enemies
I first encountered the IF Archive in 1999, and the first game I downloaded was not Photopia or Spider and Web, but Enemies, which is so bad it put me off IF for the next year. Enemies is a tour-de-force of awfulness, the third and worst of Andy Phillips's monstrous .z8 fiascos. When playing this, I can only marvel at how one can write so much and learn so little. The writing here isn't so much composed as decomposed, with rancid attempts at characterisation, putrid prose, and thoroughly rotten dialogue. If you're trying to write a tough thriller, at least pretend you have some kind of worldly experience; this thing reads like it was written by Just William. The characters are supposed to be adults, but they're obsessed with minor events from their schooldays in the way that only schoolchildren and complete retards are. The villain is like a child's idea of a criminal mastermind, and the sexual content isn't even mature enough to be called puerile. Thankfully there's very little of it.
Phillips can't write, and he can't design a game. Almost every puzzle
is badly broken, almost every game design principle is violated, mimesis
rarely enters the building, verbs must be guessed all over the place, the
PC must perform one unmotivated action after another, and so on. And on
and on and on, for thousands and thousands of moves. This game is truly
awful on a vast, unprecedented scale, which one can only hope will never
be repeated.
Guess the
Verb!
I imagine most people probably like this game, which begins
competently, and even cleverly, though the prose has an immediate air of
smug over-confidence which I find off-putting. I wonder if many people
took the path where the smugness becomes positively emetic: the section
where we meet the author and friends, and are evidently supposed to have
lots of fun hanging out with this high-larious bunch of computer-lab
saddoes. I can only imagine that the author intended to impress everyone
with what a likeable, funny guy he is, but it's almost always a bad idea
to write yourself into your own fiction, especially in this manner. Such
self-advertising invariably makes you look a nauseating twat. It doesn't
help that Leo and chums are exactly the kind of people I (and everyone I
know) would have avoided in college, and when you consider that I studied
computer science, we're talking nerds so nerdy that other nerds steer
clear. It's bad enough being immersed in other people's self-admiring
injokes, and it's worse still being stuck in a lab with this crowd.
Futz
Mutz
The guy who wrote this game (one Tim Simmons) is clearly a complete asshole. (And also, I'm told, has a completely clear asshole. He performs regular Rim Trimmons.) The evidence for his anality is all over the game. Where to begin? The outrageous racist stereotyping? The puerile sneers at other development systems? Actually, let's go straight to the heart of it: the crude, bizarre, baffling, sexist and jaw-droppingly stupid insult towards a particular member of the IF community. Which, so far as I can tell, was provoked by her being female, and having given some mildly negative reviews to a few games in Comp99. I wonder what the author of Futz Mutz would have to say about this review? I suspect that if it came to insulting me, he'd lack both Gutz and Nutz, not that I'd care if he did, because when it comes to the English language, he's a total Klutz.
And his game, to coin a phrase, Suckz Butz. Poorly written, poorly
designed, and laced throughout with the ignorant smugness of a hardened
Bush voter. The game ends with an obnoxious self-congratulatory credits
sequence, where Trimmings lauds himself as the genius behind the coding,
writing, design and music (some cheesy rock in an easter egg). But sadly,
he's only a genius in his own duvet, where no doubt he's giving himself
self-congratulatory handshakes to this day. Because, as one of his
characters might say: "when you has the charm of Tim Simmons, you has to
Sim Wimmons."
A Week in
the Life
While its aims are not as revolting as A Moment of Hope, the execution of this angstfest is far worse. As with A Moment, we are served a steady stream of unmediated self-pity; but here it's abstracted, universalised self-pity. The player is presented with a set of problems like "An examination looms, causing turbulence" and "A man surprises and secretly delights you with his attentions. Does he love you? Do you love him?" Do I give a fuck? How could anyone be expected to find such flat, generic angst in the least compelling? In reality, people never suffer from universalised problems, but from specific ones. Portraying your specific problems as universals is not just a terrible artistic choice, it's also dishonest and spineless. Not to mention incredibly lazy.
On top of that, the gameplay is appalling. Each problem is brought to
its immensely self-pitying resolution by guessing a verb more or less at
random. In theory the game can be finished in seven moves, but the chances
are you'll have quit in frustration long before the end.
Acid
Whiplash
Originality qua originality is highly overrated: any idiot can bang never-before-seen combinations of words together. One such idiot is Rybread Celsius, who pulled a few dreadully incoherent comp games out of his ass a few years ago, convincing certain IF fans that he wasn't an idiot, but an idiot savant. I've always found the "cult of Rybread" gag tedious in the extreme, which immediately makes me the wrong audience for this game, a co-authored celebration of the great man and his works.
In Whiplash, the adulation has clearly gone to Rybread's head,
for his regular diarrhoea-like prose is here backed up with an unbearable
self-conscious humour. I use the word "humour" loosely, for Acid
Whiplash was in fact the most unfunny ten minutes of my life. Have you
ever watched a comedian die on his arse? Well, there's something even
worse about watching a comedian die on his arse interactively, as
it seems that my commands are provoking one desperately bad gag after
another, making me personally complicit in the whole joyless enterprise.
Much of the failed humour was in a series of deeply irritating interviews,
for which co-author Sandifer must take at least half of the blame. If
anything, interviewer was even more smug and unfunny than interviewee.
Pick
up the Phone Booth and Die
This is just a shit non-joke that took about twenty seconds to code,
the IF equivalent of some time-wasting livejournal meme, or a funnee
forwarded JPEG that I forward straight into the junk. Maybe you just had
to be there in 1996? I wouldn't mention PUTPBAD at all were it not
for the various blowflies who enjoy internet trash, who keep this "game"
in the popular consciousness and keep recommending it to newcomers. Sure,
it takes only five seconds to play, but they are five seconds you'll
regret for years afterwards.
Eragon
Which I have already discussed in sufficient
detail.
Kallisti
This loathsome, pretentious, overwritten catastrophe was widely and justly panned at the time of its release. The author has since claimed that it was a deliberately bad game, written to annoy people, which if anything makes it even more offensive than if it had been a genuine effort. Why would you write a game just to annoy people? Unless, that is, you were an asshole? The author cites his "twisted sense of humour" as an excuse, but in my experience people who claim to have a "twisted sense of humour" are almost as grey and humourless as people who say "I'm mad, me! Completely crazy!"
All that said, I wouldn't take the author's after-the-fact claims of
being deliberately bad at face value. It remains to be seen whether he's
genuinely capable of much better. He hardly covered himself in glory with
his next offering (The Granite Book; like a granite book, I had to
put it down after five seconds), so it could well be that he resorted to
"it's deliberately bad" after the negative reviews started to flood in. Am
I being too harsh? Maybe; but it just shows what a bad idea it is to cry
wolf with your first game.
BOFH
Based on his public persona, one might be forgiven for concluding that Howard Sherman is a misogynistic bully with a hardon for those in positions of power. This shoddily-written, poorly-coded game appears to exist solely as an excuse for Howard to indulge in some of his tawdry fantasies. The Bastard Operator from Hell scenario is not Howard's (though I doubt he stresses this point at sales conventions); all he brings to the party is his own brand of incompetence and sadism. If you enjoy battling with coding errors, salivating over expensive computer systems, and ramming someone with a cattle-prod until they wet themselves, then this game could be for you. Though you'd probably prefer this.